Islamophila: A Very Metropolitan Malady

In this 2013 book (now reissued for the first time) bestselling author and broadcaster Douglas Murray, with trademark wit, delivers an alarming analysis of the post-9/11 world. It is a devastating satire on the climate of fear in the West today. Murray’s analysis is wildly entertaining yet ultimately profound: “If absolutely everybody in the world agrees on something – from the President of the United States to most film-stars, pop-stars, Popes, Bishops, atheists, writers, film-makers, brain-boxes and everyone else – then surely they must be right. Well, no. I think they are wrong. Wildly, terribly, embarrassingly and dangerously wrong, “ writes Murray. ISLAMOPHILIA shows how so many of the celebrities above, have, at some point chosen to abandon any hope or wish to criticize Islam and instead decided to profess some degree of love for it. Love, that Murray points out in the book, is often irrational and certainly misguided: Murray is not afraid to name and shame, and the book’s tour includes Sebastian Faulks and Martin Amis, Boris Johnson, South Park, Tony Blair, Ridley Scott, David Cameron, Liam Neeson, Justin Bieber, Random House Publishers, the BBC, Richard Dawkins, the Prince of Wales and even George Bush. Yes, George Bush. “They may have done this for a range of good and bad reasons. Some of them have to done it to save other people. Some of them have done it to save themselves. Some of them have done it because they are too stupid to do anything else and others because clever people can be really dumb at times.” Murray goes on to detail the extraordinary strategic cultural efforts made in recent years to “rewrite the last few millennia of history, minimising and denigrating the impact of actual scientists and promoting the claims of Islamic proselytisers”. And he…